#1166 Foreign language (Hebrew) won't highlight
First, thanks for a GREAT software program - I use this constantly. Now, the problem... I am unable to highlight text in articles written in Hebrew. I cannot tell when this began - I do know that in Spring 2015 (not sure of the version but I can give you the time) I was able to highlight Hebrew without problems, and it showed up in the Notes panel as Hebrew text. In the SAME PDF now, I am unable to highlight text. If there is a symbol (e.g., footnote number, punctuation) it will sometimes highlight but the only thing that shows in the Notes pane is the number or punctuation - no text. I will be happy to supply you with a Hebrew article if needed. I did test also with German and it worked OK, but the alphabet is also much more similar to English. I am currently running Skim 1.4.25 (99).
Thanks!
You are talking about the text m,issng. That is different from not highlighting. So what is it really, do you get the highlight in the PDF?
The text is secondary, it is not the highliughting. We just try to fill in the text you try to highlight as best as we can. But we are dependent on Apple's PDFKit to give is that text. Sop if you don't get text, it would mean Apple does not give it to us. That's Applke's problem, and we can do nothing about that.
If I try to highlight Hebrew text that is letters only, the cursor
changes correctly (from the hand to the crosshair) but as I draw across
the letters I get a system beep, and that's it. If there is punctuation
or a footnote number, e.g., then I may get a highlight but the Notes
pane only shows the non-alpha letter. I suspect you're right about the
Mac OS, tho, because after I wrote this I tried to highlight in Preview
and had the same thing (I'd never tried Preview before). I can
highlight in Acrobat, but it's not kept separate from the file (as Skim
does). I'll see what I can do about the OS.
Thank you!!
On 2017-02-24 11:44, Christiaan Hofman wrote:
I can also reproduce this. The text in the selection is not recognized, excpet perhaps some punctuation characters. And when we don't see text, the highlighting fails. I can also see that sometimes it does npot correctly select, selecting random characters all over the page rather than in the sweeped out text. I have reported the problems to Apple. You may also do this (the problem is that it does not select text properly and does not recognize characters in the selection), the more reports the more urgent it becomes for Apple.
Hi Christiaan,
How did you reproduce it? I.e., what version of Mac, what version of
Skim, what document, etc.? Also, did you have to OCR the document or
was it already scanned as text? Apple spent about 3 hours on the phone
with me tonight and said they will refer it up to their engineers, but
they want as much information as possible. I'm going to reinstall my OS
(which is 10.11.6) overnight and see if that makes any difference. By
the way, it also happens in Mac's Preview software, so I'm wondering if
it's related to the OS. I had upgraded from 10.8 last summer and I
don't think had done any Hebrew through the Fall. Anyway, if you have a
ticket number that you filed, and would send it also, I can pass all
this along. Maybe they'll really do something. I want my Skim
back!!!!! :-)
Thanks,
Jan
On 2017-02-24 16:47, Christiaan Hofman wrote:
Actually, it looks like it depends heavily on the PDF I look at. I just looked at several rather random PDFs from the internet, I did not do any OCR. Most work correctly, but some are messed up. So it partly also seems to be a problem with the PDFs. I tested this on 10.12.3 with Skim 1.4.26. My ticket number is rdar://30697202. I attached one such PDF that gave me a lot of trouble.
I see this is marked as "won't fix," but it's 100% clear that PDFkit is not (at least the only) cause. In many Japanese and some English documents (the two primary languages I use), it is only Skim that has this problem. Preview, Acrobat, etc., handle the text just fine. Skim gives the dreaded system beep. So while I think that Christiaan Hofman is right that it's file dependent, it's also very specifically a problem with Skim. So "won't fix" is really a shame.
FWIW:
Skim 1.4.34 (108)
OSX 10.12.6（16G29）
(cannot update OSX -- known issue w/ Apple servers causing permanent update failure)